


i could be the one to make you feel that way

by TheVeryLastValkyrie



Category: The Legend of Tarzan (2016)
Genre: And Those Bloody Flashbacks, F/M, Help Her She's Awkward, I Blame the Bloody Actors, I Don't Know What's Come Over Me, Jane is Neurotic, Love is Strange
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-07-22
Updated: 2016-07-30
Packaged: 2018-07-26 03:08:10
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 1,250
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7557784
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheVeryLastValkyrie/pseuds/TheVeryLastValkyrie
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>(i could be the one to set you free)</p><p>Glimpses of how Jane and Tarzan became Jane and John, Lord and Lady Clayton, lovers, equals.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. heavy

“Oh, gosh!” It takes a moment for my heart to stop pounding, but then it starts up again. I’m losing a war against my own body, so when I do lift up my head, to smile at him, to excuse him, it’s a beat later than is technically polite. “You startled me.”

I, Jane Porter, am the worst example of manners ever called upon to teach somebody manners.

He looks sheepish, impossible though that seems – impossible that a six and a half foot tall wild man, only six months in my company, should look sheepish. I’ve embarrassed him, but I get no pleasure from it, for all he embarrasses me. I’m the one who’s taught him to look sheepish. “I apologise. It is hard for me to step heavier.”

He has trouble with contractions, I must remember that for our next lesson.

“More heavily, Tarzan.”

“More heavily, Jane.”

He’s spent half a year in this house, with Father and I, although it’s more like three months here and three in the village, not quite four, but definitely a skew in favour of people more like him. At first, I thought _we_ were people more like him, but I’m coming to understand that there are things that I can’t understand; to some, Africa is mother, goddess, home, but Elizabeth Porter was my mother. Tarzan looks more like us, fair, and his hair is the loveliest shade of dark gold, but Africa means something different to him than it does to me, and I try not to think about his hair at times like this. I’ll blush. I’m blushing.

He hasn’t yet mastered the polite art of looking away. His eyes stay on my face, watching its changing colour.

“Were you looking for me?”

“Yes.”

“Was there something you wanted to ask me?”

“Yes.”

Or the useful art of elaboration. I focus on his clothing, which is easier than his hair. It wears him rather than him wearing it, but the alternative isn’t something Father could live with. Wasimbu and the other boys don’t bother him: that’s how they live, and we should never impose our way of life on theirs, that’s his rule – but how Tarzan lived won’t ever be something we could recreate, that we _should_ recreate. He can’t go back.

He doesn’t like the name John Clayton, he shakes his head when he hears it, but sometime he’ll have to go forward. Going forward, though I know he hates it, involves shoes.

“Jane?”

When I lose focus, he touches me, and so I lose focus again. He’s curled one long hand beneath my chin, as if the invisible veil which usually separates men and women just isn’t there – white men and women, that is, explorers, interlopers, with our tea chests and our best intentions. His hands are so strange, but his touch is so gentle. I can’t help but stutter over what I want to say. I blame him in my mind, for the extraordinary knuckles pressing gently upward under my chin. I have to look at him when I speak to him, that’s only polite, but I think he sees too much when I do.

“I apologise,” I say, like an idiot. “What was it? The question you wanted to ask me.”

Only I can’t breathe to answer.


	2. frangipani

You can’t imagine all the sounds of the Congo. It’s inexpressibly loud during the day, but it’s even louder at night. In the evenings, with my father’s permission (and sometimes without it), Tarzan and I go into the jungle. My plan was to walk in a straight line from our front door until I got lost in it, but he shook his head. During the day, everything is my way; at night, we do things his way. We start on the very edge, and he tells me what he thinks the names of the trees are in English, and what kind of animal likes this kind of undergrowth best.

I’m on tenterhooks around him in the house. I feel him everywhere. I’m quite as aware of him in the jungle, but it’s my animal sense that follows him here: the hair on my arms stands up as stiff as on a hairbrush, I hear him move before I see it. We crouch, and the pain from cramp makes me want to stand back up again, but I don’t. Everything is purple, grey. He won’t tell me why precisely we’ve come here tonight, but there isn’t a single inch of it that isn’t beautiful.

“Jane.”

He has, in a hand twice or three times the size of mine, in fingers that don’t bend like mine do, a flower – a blossom, really. It looks like a frangipani, only full yellow, and as I watch, first the flower, then all the lovely, shadowed planes of his face, picked out for me by the gathering moonlight, he crushes the petals between his fingers. It’s so quick and so cruel that I want to say, ‘don’t, you’ll hurt it’ a moment too late to do any good.

After all, it’s only a flower.

I’m too old to mourn a flower.

Tarzan can’t remember the word for ‘smell’, or he doesn’t want to. For whatever reason, he pantomimes an exaggerated sniffing motion as he proffers the blossom which makes his eyes rattle in their sockets. I laugh. I bend my head, and the smell of sugar cookies rises from the pale lemon syrup which the flower exuded, which coats his fingertips.

In my head, the flower gave it to him willingly.

With one of those lightning changes of objective of his, of expression, he tucks the blossom behind my left ear. I feel like I’m drowning in its perfume. I think of society ladies in England with silk roses on their hats, and I know in my heart that nothing, _nothing_ compares to this.

He sees me lose myself to the flower, he wants to bring me back.

Or maybe…maybe that isn’t the reason this time.

Purple and grey become violet and silver when he cups the back of my neck, drawing small shapes on the skin that are like teeth marks. I feel them like teeth marks. He’s a mother cat and I’m a kitten, but there’s nothing motherly in how he’s touching me now. My blood wants to burn me from the inside out, my skin wants to slough off in strips.

“Tarzan, no.”

“Why no?”

“Why _not_. Why not because it isn’t proper.”

‘Proper’ is a word he recognises. It sums up all those things he shouldn’t do, but which I can’t explain why he shouldn’t do. To him, ‘proper’ is an impediment to everything natural, everything honest, everything civilised society hangs shame around the neck of because they came out of the jungle thousands of years ago, and consider themselves much the better for it.

His eyes seem to ache, like mine.

“Why not?” He asks softly, only attending to half my lesson. I hear him swallow, even above the calls of the night birds. I sense the shift from neck to hair and the pleasant prickling of one particular strand being pulled, being wound up like a spool of thread. For a little while now, he’s been capable of combing his own hair. I wonder if the thick, soft weight of it is the same, if I’m even remembering it correctly.

“Because,” I lie. “I don’t _want you to_.”

Immediately, Tarzan lets me go.

Immediately, I regret asking him to.


End file.
